This past September, I took a one-week course in landscape photography in South-Central France. (One of my many blessings of this life is that I had the good fortune to take this course with my son, Sam. You can see his Instagram site here.) The course was taught by Rhian Lefton, and her sensitivity to the surrounding landscapes was, by itself, an invaluable lesson. We talked briefly (one week is such a short amount of time) about some of the aspects of the landscape: its archeology, biology, forestry, human history, political history, etc. I mean, pick an ism and you can see it in the landscape, or, at least, interpret the landscape through that particular pr(ism).

In a passing thought one day, she sent us a link to this video, in which Jenny Odell talks about Deep Time, and, because I am sixty-six years old, I think about time a lot - a lot of the time, as it were. And a subset of that thinking is about time and photography.

Photographers freeze time, which is a major asset of the art, and also, of course, its Achilles' heel. Over the years, people have tried various ways of introducing the passage of time to their images, with techniques ranging from multiple exposures to shutter dragging to side-by-sides taken across seasons or decades. Panning implies movement, which in turn implies the passing of time, as can, to a lesser (often dizzying) degree, zooming in or out while the shutter is open. Long exposures of the night sky show us the movement of the stars, and the passing of airplanes, comets and specks of space debris.

But none of these gestures come close to indicating deep time, as I understand it. Deep time is a phrase I first encountered while ensconced in the suspended time of Covid and read Robert Macfarlane's book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. (The term was originally coined by John McPhee back in 1981, according to Wikipedia at any rate.) Macfarlane takes you into caverns, caves, and deep underground realms where water and other geological forces have created vast spaces most of us never imagine, much less witness. Relative to the time it takes to create these underground worlds, photography as a whole has barely taken its first breath.

Deep time reassures me that, should a handful of people fill our atmosphere with radiation, creatures currently living in the bottom one-third of the ocean will eventually find their way to land, and some may even develop awareness and intelligence. Deep time can be a reassuring concept to retreat to when faced with immediate crises that either are, or deeply feel, existential.

It does not show up in portraiture or wedding photos or street photography. It may in some still lifes, but it is inherently the backstory of every landscape. Every Appalachian vista has been smoothed out over millions of years, and each one hides within the images of the Rockies, or the Andes, the Himalayas. The small stream across the street from my house one sat under billions of tons of ice, and the serenity of the American Southwest once teemed with tropical life.

In a culture where time has become nearly frenetic, I think this span of time is worth considering - or imagining, more likely - whenever we turn our lens on the world around us. Its age is incomprehensible to us, and so the wisdom of how it has endured, and changed, and changed in order to endure, is a lesson we maybe ought to try and instill into our awareness just a bit more. Patience, resoluteness, progressive change that is slow, steady and inevitable. They are all there, in every photo, beyond the horizon and beneath the blue hills. It just takes time to see them.